rom Lizard
Town by coach to seek our fortunes in London. In London it is that I
must resume my tale. Of our early mishaps and misadventures I need
not speak, the result being discernible as the story progresses.
We did not find our fortunes, but we found some wisdom. Neither Tom
nor I ever confessed to disappointment at finding the pavements of
mere stone, but certainly two more absolute Whittingtons never trod
the streets of the great city.

But before I resume I must say a few words of myself. No reader can
gather the true moral of this narrative who does not take into
account the effect which the cruel death of my parents had wrought on
me. From the day of the wreck hate had been my constant companion,
cherished and nursed in my heart until it held complete mastery over
all other passions. I lived, so I told myself over and over again,
but to avenge, to seek Simon Colliver high and low until I held him
at my mercy. Thousands of times I rehearsed the scene of our
meeting, and always I held the knife which stabbed my father. In my
waking thoughts, in my dreams, I was always pursuing, and Colliver
for ever fleeing before me. In every crowd I seemed to watch for his
face alone, at every street-corner to listen for his voice--that
face, that voice, which I should know among thousands. I had read
De Quincey's "Opium-Eater," and the picture of his unresting search
for his lost Ann somehow seized upon my imagination. Night after
night it was to Oxford Street that my devil drove me: night after
night I paced the "never-ending terraces," as did the opium-eater, on
my tireless quest--but with feelings how different! To me it was but
one long thirst of hatred, the long avenues of gaslight vistas of an
avenging hell, all the multitudinous sounds of life but the chorus of
that song to which my footsteps trod--

"Sing ho! but he waits for you."

To London had Simon Colliver come, and somewhere, some day, he would
be mine. Until that day I sought a living face in a city of dead
men, and down that illimitable slope to Holborn, and back again, I
would tramp until the pavements were silent and deserted, then seek
my lodging and throw myself exhausted on the bed.

In a dingy garret, looking out, when its grimy panes allowed, above
one of the many squalid streets that feed the main artery of the
Strand, my story begins anew. The furniture of the room relieves me
of the task of word-painting, being more effectively